it is not so much (as poor Conservatives say)
that parental authority ought to be preserved, as that it cannot be
destroyed. Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the idea of forming
a child's mind. In that case Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
for he hates something inseparable from human life. I only mentioned
educere and the drawing out of the faculties in order to point out that
even this mental trick does not avoid the inevitable idea of parental or
scholastic authority. The educator drawing out is just as arbitrary and
coercive as the instructor pouring in; for he draws out what he chooses.
He decides what in the child shall be developed and what shall not be
developed. He does not (I suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of
forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead out, with timid steps, a
shy talent for torture. The only result of all this pompous and
precise distinction between the educator and the instructor is that the
instructor pokes where he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is
poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this
intellectual violence. Education is violent; because it is creative.
It is creative because it is human. It is as reckless as playing on the
fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house.
In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with
life and growth. After that it is a trifling and even a jocular question
whether we say of this tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he
puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws things out of us, like
a dentist.

The point is that Man does what he likes. He claims the right to take
his mother Nature under his control; he claims the right to make
his child the Superman, in his image. Once flinch from this creative
authority of man, and the whole courageous raid which we call
civilization wavers and falls to pieces. Now most modern freedom is at
root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it
is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw
and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral
responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild
step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth
of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an
unshaken voice. Th